Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

mono-project.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 509 posts

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#231

Post by lolinder »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #199
Kye wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For historical context: this was before the conclusion of the antitrust case that led Microsoft to start softening its stance toward open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor... . This was the same year Antitrust came out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film) Any support for open source or cross-platform stuff was a bulwark against claims of monopoly abuse, but none of it wor…

> Nowadays it sounds like .NET Core + third-party GUI libraries is the way to go. For reference for those unfamiliar with the terms: .NET Core was the name given to the cross-platform fork of the .NET runtime. It was forked out of .NET 4.x and dropped support for a lot of things in the first versions. It ran on various distributions of Linux and MacOS. At the same time there were forks of other libraries/frameworks i…

Okay, this helps a lot! So .NET Core is now out of date, and any version of .NET >= 5 is cross-platform and has no Core variant?

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#233

Post by Rochus »

neonsunset wrote: post #230
Rochus wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oberon+ that compiles to (terrible) CIL Why so arrogant? The CIL is good enough. It's a promise of the ECMA-335 to cope even with unoptimized CIL, and Mono indeed includes many optimization steps. Your arguments - especially concerning SIMD and other features supported by CoreCLR - are absolutely not relevant in this context. CIL is always the same (regardless whether the CIL was generated by your big C# or my smal…

> The CIL is good enough. Comparison against Oberon+ string primitives allocates a new char array every time. Other operations allocated it to just null-terminate it (string constants are null-terminated already for example, or can be done so explicitly by compiler instead, in any case this is an incorrect design). Somehow, it failed the basic task of modeling C behaviors on the one and only high-level bytecode targe…

> string primitives allocates a new char array every time.

So what? What do you think do the dotnet string or marshalling classes internally? And how should that affect the performance comparison if we feed the same CIL to both - Mono and CoreCLR?

But we can leave it at this; people can read the arguments at the given link, we don't have to repeat everything again.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#234

Post by paranoidrobot »

lolinder wrote: post #231
paranoidrobot wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowadays it sounds like .NET Core + third-party GUI libraries is the way to go. For reference for those unfamiliar with the terms: .NET Core was the name given to the cross-platform fork of the .NET runtime. It was forked out of .NET 4.x and dropped support for a lot of things in the first versions. It ran on various distributions of Linux and MacOS. At the same time there were forks of other libraries/frameworks i…

Okay, this helps a lot! So .NET Core is now out of date, and any version of .NET >= 5 is cross-platform and has no Core variant?

That's correct

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#235

Post by YoshiRulz »

lolinder wrote: post #49
zbowling wrote: post #31

I worked on Mono a lot back in the early 2000s (back in the SVN days before it moved to Git, even). This move makes a lot of sense. Things evolved a lot over the years. Mono's legacy goals, which are to be a portable CLR (.NET) runtime for platforms that Microsoft didn't care about, don't make much sense today. Mono made a lot of sense for running places where full .NET didn't, like in full AOT environments like on t…

Is there somewhere where someone new to the ecosystem can get a simple introduction to all of these different terms and which ones are still relevant today? I looked into .NET somewhat recently and came away with the apparently mistaken impression that Mono was how .NET did cross-platform. I guess I must have been reading old docs, but I'm pretty sure they were at least semi-official. Is there good documentation some…

> Is there somewhere where someone new to the ecosystem can get a simple introduction to all of these different terms and which ones are still relevant today?

Not really. It's legacy cruft all the way down.

But the good news is that if you stay on the beaten path, using the latest SDK and targeting the latest Runtime, everything Just WorksTM.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#236

Post by kristopolous »

deelowe wrote: post #136
kelnos wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Microsoft has finally realized that its animus toward projects like Wine and pre-acquisition Mono was ultimately unproductive, and a net negative for Microsoft itself. I still don't trust MS's motives in general, but I think they at least recognize that Wine/Proton helps make the Win32 and DirectX APIs a sort of de-facto cross-platform standard when it comes to things like desktop gaming, and that this is a g…

Microsoft as a company is extremely myopic. Budgets are scrutinized down to the penny every few months at very senior levels. This drives a culture of immediacy. Wine was a threat until Microsoft realized everyone in tech had moved to service based business models (aka "cloud"). Only afterwards, did they "realize" Linux as a threat to their long term viability no longer mattered.

They finally started to admit where they're losers and stop trying to fight those battles.

Dumping endless piles of cash into projects nobody cares about and pretending like you're the dominant player when you control some dwindling 2% of the market is stupid and more companies should learn that lesson

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#237

Post by zbowling »

whyenot wrote: post #215

What is Miguel de Icaza up to these days? I saw on Wikipedia that he left MS in 2022 to take some time off, but surely he's working on something now? (if you respond, please, lets not get into his politics; HN is not the right place to have that kind of discussion)

He is making terminal emulators for iOS, iPadOS, and VisionOS and loving Swift these days.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#238

Post by ijidak »

rgovostes wrote: post #94

I always assumed Microsoft did not condone Wine or other re-implementations of their APIs (like ReactOS), but that they were protected by DMCA reverse engineering provisions and anyway too insignificant to send the legal team after. Wikipedia says, > Until 2020, Microsoft had not made any public statements about Wine. ... On 16 February 2005, Ivan Leo Puoti discovered that Microsoft had started checking the Windows R…

So, would these provisions protect a reverse engineering of CUDA?

It's hazy to me when reverse engineering of APIs is and isn't allowed.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#240

Post by kragen »

Mogzol wrote: post #224
kragen wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, i know about the microsoft apt source as for building from source, i see, thanks! or maybe it's unresolved legal concerns? nobody so far in this thread has known of any, though

I doubt it is due to legal concerns if Ubuntu, Fedora, and FreeBSD are all distributing their own builds.

you could easily imagine fedora distributing their own build of software whose licensing fails to comply with the debian free software guidelines; bundling proprietary software used to be common in linux distributions in fact
Post reply on HN